iOS 5 Beta Sets Dev’s iPhone 4 Cable on Fire

A fellow by the name of Gus Pinto has garnered some attention in the early hours of July 8th, 2011, aka this morning with a Tweet that’s about to be setting the Apple world on fire: “My charging cable caught on fire while charging my iPhone 4 running iOS5. #fail” Sound’s like a hot topic to me, does it to you? What we’re to understand here is that this particular developer of iOS-based software was running an early version of the newest Apple mobile operating system, iOS 5 on his iPhone 4, when a simple charge of the device resulted in some “small flames” which of course his iPhone cord could not hardly withstand for long.

While new versions of software in their non-complete states have been known to make devices run slightly hot (literally,) there’s certainly no cause to panic in a case like this. An iPhone 4 exploding in your face is one thing, small flames is another. This situation is the next in a long line of off-the-wall insane accounts of awesome or otherwise one-in-a-million type situations that just happen to feature Apple hardware and/or software.

Should you take your iPhone 4 running iOS 5 beta and toss it out of a moving vehicle for fear that you might be the next to immolate? Absolutely not. Should you try to recreate the situation to film flames coming out of your normally cool to the touch omnipotent Apple device? That’s your call. We’ll leave such things to you, and encourage you to avoid all thoughts of spontaneous combustion while you do so – no back burners or flames from within for you!

That said, if Gus is to be believed, there was certainly some radically terrible combination of elements going on here that created a perfect firestorm, and Apple is already almost certainly coming down hot to Gus’s mailbox with a dousing rod looking for mystical answers.

Everyone else – stay safe! Don’t worry about fire from your iOS, but keep those oven mitts handy whenever you handle any kind of electronics, because you never know when they might explode!